The
Substance
of
Style
How the Rise of Aesthetic Value
Is Remaking Commerce,
Culture, and Consciousness
V
i r g i n i a
p o s t r e l
A HarperCollins e-books
prefa c e
As soon as the Taliban fell, Afghan men lined up at barbershops
to have their beards shaved off. Women painted their nails with onceforbidden polish. Form erly clandestine beauty salons opened in
prominent locations. Men traded postcards of beautiful Indian movie
stars, and thronged to buy imported TVs, VCRs, and videotapes.
Even burka merchants diversified their wares, adding colors like
brown, peach, and green to the blue and off-white dictated by the
Taliban’s whip-wielding virtue police. Freed to travel to city markets,
village women demanded better fabric, finer embroidery, and more
variety in their traditional garments.
W hen a Michigan hairdresser went to Kabul with a group of doc­
tors, nurses, dentists, and social workers, she intended to serve as an
all-purpose assistant to the relief mission’s professionals. Instead, she
found her own services every bit as popular as the serious business of
health and welfare. “W hen word got out there was a hairdresser in
the country, it just got crazy,” she said. “I was doing haircuts every
fifteen minutes.”
Liberation is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, edu­
cation, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things
vi
Prefa ce
were just as important. As a political commentator noted, “The right
to shave may be found in no international treaty or covenant, but it
has, in Afghanistan, become one of the first freedoms to which claim
is being laid .”
That reaction challenged many widely held assumptions about the
nature of aesthetic value. W hile they cherish artworks like the giant
Bamiyan Buddhas leveled by the Taliban, social critics generally take
a different view of the frivolous, consumerist impulses expressed in
more mundane aesthetic pleasures. “How depressing was it to see
Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer
electronics?” wrote Anna Quindlen in a 2001 Christmas column
berating Americans for “uncontrollable consumerism.”
Respectable opinion holds that our persistent interest in variety,
adornment, and new sensory pleasures is created by advertising,
which generates “the desire for products consumers [don’t] need at
all,” as Quindlen put it, declaring that “I do not need an alpaca swing
coat, a tourmaline brooch, a mixer with a dough hook, a CD player
that works in the shower, another pair of boot-cut black pants, laven­
der bath salts, vanilla candles or a KateSpadeGucciPradaCoach bag.”
W hat’s true for New Yorkers should be true for Afghans as well.
W hy buy a green burka when you’re a poor peasant and already have
two blue ones? W hy paint your nails red if you’re a destitute widow
begging on the streets? These indulgences seem wasteful and irra­
tional, just the sort of false needs encouraged by commercial m anip­
ulation. Yet liberated Kabul had no ubiquitous advertising or
elaborate m arketing campaigns. Maybe our desires for impractical
decoration and meaningless fashion don’t come from Madison
Avenue after all. Maybe our relation to aesthetic value is too funda­
mental to be explained by commercial mind control.
Human beings know the world, and each other, through our sens­
es. From our earliest moments, the look and feel of our surroundings
tell us who and where we are. But as we grow, we imbibe a different
lesson: that appearances are not just potentially deceiving but frivo­
lous and unimportant— that aesthetic value is not real except in those
rare instances when it transcends the quotidian to become high art.
Prefa ce
vii
We learn to contrast surface to substance, to believe that our real
selves and the real world exist beyond the superficiality of sensation.
W e have good cause, of course, to doubt the simple evidence of
our senses. The sun does not go around the earth. Lines of the same
length can look longer or shorter depending on how you place arrows
on their ends. Beautiful people are not necessarily good, nor are good
people necessarily beautiful. W e’re wise to m aintain reasonable
doubts.
But rejecting our sensory natures has problems of its own. When
we declare that mere surface cannot possibly have legitim ate value,
we deny human experience and ignore human behavior. W e set our­
selves up to be fooled again and again, and we m ake ourselves a little
crazy. W e veer m adly between overvaluing and undervaluing the
importance of aesthetics. Instead of upholding rationality against
mere sensuality, we tangle ourselves in contradictions.
This book seeks to untangle those confusions, by examining afresh
the nature of aesthetic value and its relation to our personal, econom­
ic, and social lives. It’s important to do so now, because sensory
appeals are becoming ever more prominent in our culture. To m ain­
tain a healthy balance between substance and surface, we can no
longer simply pretend that surfaces don’t matter. Experience suggests
that the comfortable old slogans, and the theories behind them, are
wrong.
Afghanistan is not the only place where human behavior con­
founds conventional assumptions, raising questions about the sources
of aesthetic value. Consider “authenticity,” which aesthetic authorities
consider a prime measure of worth. Here, too, experience suggests a
more complex standard, or perhaps a more subjective definition of
what’s authentic, than intellectual discourse usually provides.
Built atop one of the hills that divide the San Fernando Valley
from the core of Los Angeles, Universal CityW alk is deliberately
fake. Its architect calls the open-air shopping m all “a great sim u­
lacrum of what L.A. should do. This isn’t the L.A. we did get, but it’s
the L.A. we could have gotten— the quintessential, idealized L .A .”
Like the rest of Los Angeles, C ityW alk’s buildings are mostly
vii
Prefa ce
stucco boxes. Their aesthetic energy comes from their facades, which
are adorned with bright signs, colorful tiles, video screens, murals,
and such playful accessories as a giant King Kong. U nlike the typical
shopping center, CityW alk has encouraged its tenants to let their dec­
orative imaginations run wild. The place has a tiny artificial beach
and, of course, palm trees. A fountain shoots water up through the
sidewalk. A fictional radio station sells hamburgers, and a real muse­
um displays vintage neon signs. The three blocks of city “street” are
off-limits to vehicles.
W hen C ityW alk opened in 1993, it was roundly condemned as an
inauthentic facsimile of real city life. Intellectuals saw only a fortress,
a phony refuge from the diversity and conflict of a city recently torn
by riots. A conservative journalist called it “Exhibit A in a hot new
trend among the beleaguered middle classes: bunkering,” while a lib­
eral social critic said CityW alk “has something of the relationship to
the real city that a petting zoo has to nature.”
The public reacted differently. Almost immediately, CityW alk
became not a bunker but a grand m ixing zone. “Suddenly CityW alk
was full of people. And they were all grinning,” wrote a delighted
veteran of European cafes shortly after the new mall opened. H e pre­
dicted that the artificial city street would soon become a beloved
hangout, that locals would never want to leave. He was right. A
decade later, CityW alk may be “the most vital public space in Los
Angeles,” declares a m agazine report. On a Saturday night,
P eop le fr o m a ll across L.A. h a ve g a th ered h ere in o n e g rea t
u n d ifferen tia ted mass, as th ey ra rely do in th e city itself. Toddlers
are tea rin g across C ityW alfs sidew alk fo u n ta in . Salvadoran,
A rmenian, K orean, black, an d w hite, th ey sq u eal as th e hidden
w a ter je ts erupt, soak ing th eir overalls. H undreds o f teen a gers w h o
h a ve m ad e CityWalk th eir h a n gou t are p ick in g ea ch o th er up an d
su ck ing d ow n fro z e n m ochas. F am ilies fr o m E ncino to East L.A.
are laughin g, stu ffin g th eir fa ces, ga w k in g at th e b righ t spires o f
light.
Prefa ce
ix
So much for the assumption that artifice and interaction are
contradictory, that the only experience a “sim ulacrum ” can produce
is inauthentic. By offering a place of shared aesthetic pleasures,
C ityW alk has created not an isolated enclave but a space where
people from m any different backgrounds can enjoy themselves
together.
H alf a world away is an even more artificial environment, where
not only the street but the sky itself is fake. The social results are sim­
ilar. “It’s a very special building, very different, very beautiful,” says a
black South African of Johannesburg’s Montecasino, a casino that
replicates a Tuscan village, right down to imported cobblestones and
an old Fiat accumulating parking tickets by the side of the makebelieve road. U nlike many places in Johannesburg, Montecasino
attracts a racially mixed crowd, including unemployed black men
who chat beneath its artificial trees and watch the gamblers at play.
Like C ityW alk, the casino offers its aesthetic pleasures to all comers.
Its deracinated design is central to its appeal.
“Montecasino imposes nothing on anyone. It is completely, exu­
berantly fake,” writes a Togo-based critic. “And, as in Las Vegas, it is
this fakeness that ensures its egalitarian popularity. Blacks and whites
feel equally at home in this reassuringly bogus Tuscany. The price of
democracy, it would seem, is inauthenticity.” Or maybe something is
wrong with aesthetic standards that would deny people pleasures that
don’t conform to their particular era or ethnicity. Maybe w e’ve m is­
understood the m eaning and value of authenticity.
And perhaps our love of fine art has sim ilarly blinded us to the
nature of aesthetic appeals. W hile “art” can certainly be a meaningful
category, it can also be deceptive, forcing sensory value into a tran­
scendent ghetto separated from the rest of life. Again, recent experi­
ence offers a cautionary tale.
Like most museums, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum, in New York owns a much larger collection than it has
space to display. W hile its exhibits mostly showcase finished artifacts,
the offstage collection includes boxes and boxes of designers’ drawings— not art to be displayed but instructions to be followed. In April
x
Prefa ce
2002, Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries of
Scotland, went through about eight thousand of those drawings as
research for a book about the relationship between the fine and
applied arts. In Box D366, which was labeled “Lighting Fixtures II,”
he made an extraordinary find:
It’s a b ig d ra w in g o f a candlestick in black chalk, h eigh ten ed by a
brow n wash applied by brush, w ith som e un d er-d ra w in g d on e w ith
a sty lu s.. . . It not o n ly sh ow s th e eleva tion o f th e draw ing, bu t also
th e pla n o f th e ob ject. I b eliev e it w as g o in g to b e cu t in m arble. It
is o f a m assive can delabru m , a b ou t 15ft-high—p ro b a b ly co m m is­
sion ed f o r th e tom b o f P op e L eo X di M edici, an d n ev er used.
Clifford identified the sketch as the work of Michelangelo. Other
experts concurred.
If a draw ing is by Michelangelo, we presume it’s art. But the can­
dlestick sketch is still a blueprint— a design, not a display piece. It’s
not even clear that Michelangelo him self would have constructed the
candelabrum. Like architecture, artifacts need not be crafted by their
creators. Today’s commentators denounce art museums for “dumbing-down” their exhibits with motorcycles, guitars, and Armani
clothes, but the line between art and artifacts was not always so rigid.
“Renaissance artists of the highest caliber were commissioned to
design decorative objects such as lamps, salt cellars and tapestries,”
notes a Cooper-Hewitt decorative-arts expert. Modern m anufactur­
ing does not reduce the importance of initial design.
You no longer have to be a Medici to enjoy aesthetic abundance,
including ever more customized combinations. Not only monuments
but the humblest of objects increasingly embody fine design. This
book is not about art per se but about the profusion of style in every­
day life. It is about life and work, pleasure and meaning, in a new age
of aesthetics.
Several themes run throughout the book: that aesthetic value is
subjective and can be discovered only through experience, not
deduced in advance; that sensory pleasure and m eaning are funda­
Prefa ce
xi
mental, biologically based human wants but that their particular
expressions vary; that people m ake different trade-offs among goods
depending on the alternatives they face; and that aesthetics is not a
value set off from the rest of life. Decoration and adornment are nei­
ther higher nor lower than “real” life. They are part of it.
One
the
aesthetic
imperative
eople don’t generally go to
Selkirk, N ew York, to look for the future. M anhattan, yes. L.A., San
Francisco, even Seattle. But not Selkirk.
There are a million people in a fifteen-mile radius, my host tells
me, but you wouldn’t know it as we drive past snow-covered fields.
The place looks empty. W e’re a few miles outside Albany, in what
m ight as well be rural New England. Western Massachusetts is less
than half an hour away, Vermont not much farther.
The area is much more influential than the picturesque country­
side suggests. Selkirk is smack in the m iddle of General Electric ter­
ritory, snuggled between the research labs and power systems
operations in Schenectady and the GE Plastics headquarters in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. That means Selkirk is more than just
another out-of-the-way place, because GE is more than just another
2
The Substance of Style
big corporation. GE has been, year after year, the most admired com­
pany in the business world, an enterprise known for its technological
prowess, consistent growth, and hardheaded management.
We turn up a narrow drive and park in front of a small building,
the sort of corrugated prefab structure that m ight house a small con­
struction company or insurance office. This modest site is the
American center of a m ultim illion-dollar bet on the future. GE
Plastics believes w e’re entering an era in which the look and feel of
products w ill determine their success. Sensory, even subliminal,
effects w ill be essential competitive tools. GE wants to m ake those
tools, and to help customers use them more effectively.
“Aesthetics, or styling, has become an accepted unique selling
point— on a global basis,” explains the head of the division’s global aes­
thetics program. Functionality still matters, of course. But competition
has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers
can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as
traditionally defined. In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the
only way to make a product stand out. Quality and price may be
absolutes, but tastes still vary, and not every manufacturer has already
learned how to m ake products that appeal to the senses.
The modest building in Selkirk houses a design center that cus­
tomers can visit to brainstorm and develop new products, inspired by
the materials available to make them. Instead of just telling engineers
and purchasing managers how cheaply GE can sell them raw mate­
rials, plastics managers now listen to industrial designers and m ar­
keting people “talk about their dreams.”
We enter through humdrum gray offices, w alk through the plant
floor where plastic samples are mixed with pigments and extruded,
and open a bright blue door. On the other side lies an entirely differ­
ent environment, designed for creativity and comfort rather than
low-cost function. This end of the building proclaims the importance
of aesthetics for places as well as plastics. Gone are the utilitarian
grays of cubicles and indoor-outdoor carpet, replaced by contrasting
blue and white walls, light wood floors, shelves of design books, and
comfortable couches for conversation. Customers’ hit products are
The Aesthetic Imperative
3
displayed in m useum -lit alcoves: Iomega’s Zip drive in translucent
dark blue plastic, the H andspring Visor in a paler shade.
The center’s most striking room isn’t “decorated” at all. It’s lined
with row upon row of GE Plastics’ own products— about four thou­
sand sample chips, each a little smaller than a computer diskette, in a
rainbow of colors and an impressive range of apparent textures. Since
1995, the company has introduced twenty new visual effects. Its
heavy-duty engineering thermoplastics can now emulate metal, stone,
marble, or mother-of-pearl; they can diffuse light or change colors
depending on which way you look; they can be embedded with tiny,
sparkling glass fragments. The special-effects plastics command
prices from 15 percent to more than 100 percent higher than ordinary
Lexan or Cycolac. W ith that incentive, company researchers are busy
coming up with new effects, having accelerated introductions in 2001
and 2002. “The sky’s the lim it,” says a spokesman.
The Selkirk plant w ill mix up a batch of any color you can im ag­
ine, and the company prides itself on turning barely articulated
desires into hard plastic: “You know how the sky looks just after a
storm? W hen it’s late afternoon? But right at the horizon, not above
it? W hen the sun has just come out? T hat color.” T hat’s from a GE
Plastics ad. In the real world, designers come to Selkirk to play
around with color, paying the company thousands of dollars for the
privilege. T hat’s how the trim on Kyocera’s mobile phone went from
bright silver to gunmetal gray. The project’s lead engineer told tech­
nicians he wanted something more masculine. “I figured that they
would look at me as if I were nuts. But they didn’t,” he says. “They
came back a few minutes later with exactly what we wanted.” Once
you’ve got the perfect color, the Selkirk center will (for a fee) preserve
a pristine sample in its two-thousand-square-foot freezer. More than
a million color-sample chips are filed in the freezer’s movable stacks,
protected from the distorting effects of heat and light.
At the end of my visit, GE managers talk a bit about their own
aesthetic dreams. Already, researchers have figured out how to make
plastics feel heavy, for times when heft conveys a tacit sense of quali­
ty. Coming soon are joint ventures that will let customers put GE
4
The Substance of Style
effects into materials the company doesn’t make. Squishy “softtouch” plastics won’t have to look like rubber. Cushy grips w ill be
translucent and sparkle, to coordinate with diamond-effect GE plas­
tics. And somewhere in the aesthetic future are plastics that smell. “I
love the smell of suntan lotion,” says a manager, laughing at his own
enthusiasm, “but that’s just m e.” He imagines sitting in his office in
snowy New England with a computer that exudes the faint scent of
summer at the beach.
GE is betting real money on such imaginative leaps— on a future
that will sparkle like diamonds and smell like summer, that will offer
every color that delights the eye and every texture that pleases the
touch, on a future of sensory riches. GE believes in an aesthetic age.
This is not a hip San Francisco style shop. These executives don’t
get their photos in fashion magazines or go to celebrity-filled parties.
They don’t dress in black, pierce their eyebrows, or wear Euro-style
narrow eyeglasses. This is General Electric. Jack W elch’s company.
Thomas Edison’s company. An enterprise dedicated to science, engi­
neering, and ruthless financial expectations. A tough company,
macho even. GE doesn’t invest in ideas just because they sound cool.
W hen a trend comes to Selkirk, it’s no passing fancy.
T ie twenty-first century isn’t what the old movies imagined. W e cit­
izens of the future don’t wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian
high-rises, or get our food in pills. To the contrary, we are demanding
and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world.
W e want our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our
bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities. We
expect every strip m all and city block to offer designer coffee, several
different cuisines, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics worksta­
tions, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. We demand trees in
our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative facades on our super­
markets, auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell.
Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To
succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs
The Aesthetic Imperative
5
must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously.
We, their customers, demand it.
“We are by nature— by deep, biological nature— visual, tactile
creatures,” says David Brown, the former president of the Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a longtime observer of
the design world. That is a quintessential turn-of-our-century state­
ment, a simultaneous affirmation of biological humanity and aes­
thetic power. Our sensory side is as valid a part of our nature as the
capacity to speak or reason, and it is essential to both. Artifacts do not
need some other justification for pleasing our visual, tactile, emo­
tional natures. Design, says Brown, is moving from the abstract and
ideological— “this is good design”— to the personal and emotional—
“I like that.” In this new age of aesthetics, we are acknowledging,
accepting, and even celebrating what a design-museum curator calls
our “quirky underside.”
This trend doesn’t mean that a particular style has triumphed or
that w e’re necessarily living in a period of unprecedented creativity. It
doesn’t mean everyone or everything is now beautiful, or that people
agree on some absolute standard of taste. The issue is not w hat style is
used but rather that style is used, consciously and conscientiously,
even in areas where function used to stand alone. Aesthetics is more
pervasive than it used to be— not restricted to a social, economic, or
artistic elite, limited to only a few settings or industries, or designed to
communicate only power, influence, or wealth. Sensory appeals are
everywhere, they are increasingly personalized, and they are intensi­
fying.
Of course, saying that aesthetics is pervasive does not imply that
look and feel trump everything else. Other values have not gone away.
We may want mobile phones to sparkle, but first we expect them to
work. We expect shops to look good, but we also want service and
selection. We still care about cost, comfort, and convenience. But on
the margin, aesthetics matters more and more. W hen we decide how
next to spend our time, money, or creative effort, aesthetics is increas­
ingly likely to top our priorities.
In this context, “aesthetics” obviously does not refer to the philos­
6
The Substance of Style
ophy of art. Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the sens­
es. It is the art of creating reactions without words, through the look
and feel of people, places, and things. Hence, aesthetics differs from
entertainment that requires cognitive engagement with narrative,
word play, or complex, intellectual allusion. W hile the sound of poetry
is arguably aesthetic, the m eaning is not. Spectacular special effects
and beautiful movie stars enhance box-office success in foreign m ar­
kets because they offer universal aesthetic pleasure; clever dialogue,
which is cognitive and culture-bound, doesn’t travel as well.
Aesthetics may complement storytelling, but it is not itself narrative.
Aesthetics shows rather than tells, delights rather than instructs.
The effects are immediate, perceptual, and emotional. They are not
cognitive, although we may analyze them after the fact. As a m id­
century industrial designer said of his field, aesthetics is “fundamen­
tally the art of using line, form, tone, color, and texture to arouse an
emotional reaction in the beholder.”
W hatever information aesthetics conveys is prearticulate— the
connotation of the color and shapes of letters, not the meanings of the
words they form. Aesthetics conjures m eaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of some­
thing that is absent, a memory or an idea. Those associations may be
universal, the way Disney’s big-eyed animals play on the innate
human attraction to babies. Or they may change from person to per­
son, place to place, moment to moment.
Although we often equate aesthetics with beauty, that definition is
too limited. Depending on what reaction the creator wants, effective
presentation may be strikingly ugly, disturbing, even horrifying. The
title sequence to S even — whose rough, backlit type, seemingly stut­
tering film, and unsettling sepia images established a new style for
horror films— comes to mind. Or aesthetics may employ novelty,
allusion, or humor, rather than beauty, to arouse a positive response.
Philippe Starck’s fly swatter with a face on it doesn’t represent tim e­
less beauty. It’s just whimsical fun.
Aesthetic effects begin with universal reactions, but these effects
The Aesthetic Imperative
7
always operate in a personal and cultural context. We may like
weather-beaten paint because it seems rustic, black leather because it
makes us feel sexy, or fluffy pop music because it reminds us of our
youth. Something novel may be interesting, or something fam iliar
comforting, without regard to ideal beauty. The explosion of tropical
colors that hit wom en’s fashion in 2000 was a relief from the black,
gray, and beige of the late 1990s, while those neutrals looked calm
and sophisticated after the riot of jewel tones that preceded them.
Psychologists tell us that human beings perceive changes in sensory
inputs— movement, new visual elements, louder or softer sounds,
novel smells— more than sustained levels.
Because aesthetics operates at a prerational level, it can be disqui­
eting. We have a love-hate relationship with the whole idea. As con­
sumers, we enjoy sensory appeals but fear manipulation. As
producers, w e’d rather not work so hard to keep up with the aesthet­
ic competition. As heirs to Plato and the Puritans, we suspect sensory
impressions as deceptive, inherently false. Aesthetics is “the power of
provocative surfaces,” says a critic. It “speaks to the eye’s mind, over­
shadowing matters of quality or substance.”
But the eye’s mind is identifying something genuinely valuable.
Aesthetic pleasure itself has quality and substance. The look and feel
of things tap deep human instincts. We are, as Brown says, “visual,
tactile creatures.” We enjoy enhancing our sensory surroundings.
T hat enjoyment is real. The trick is to appreciate aesthetic pleasure
without confusing it with other values.
Theorist Ellen Dissanayake defines art as “m aking special,” a
behavior designed to be “sensorily and emotionally gratifying and
more than strictly necessary.” She argues that the instinct for “m aking
special” is universal and innate, a part of human beings’ evolved bio­
logical nature. Hers may or may not be an adequate definition of art,
but it does offer a useful insight into our aesthetic age. H aving spent
a century or more focused prim arily on other goals— solving m anu­
facturing problems, lowering costs, m aking goods and services widely
available, increasing convenience, saving energy— we are increasingly
8
The Substance of Style
engaged in m aking our world special. More people in more aspects of
life are draw ing pleasure and m eaning from the way their persons,
places, and things look and feel. Whenever we have the chance, we’re
adding sensory, emotional appeal to ordinary function.
“Aesthetics, whether people admit it or not, is why you buy some­
thing,” says a shopper purchasing a high-style iMac, its flat screen
pivoting like a desk lamp on a half-spherical base. He likes the com­
puter’s features, but he particularly likes its looks. A computer doesn’t
have to be a nondescript box. It can express its owner’s taste and per­
sonality.
“Deciding to buy an IBM instead of a Compaq simply because you
prefer black to gray is absolutely fine as long as both machines meet
your other significant criteria,” a writer advises computer shoppers
on the female-oriented iVillage Web site. “Not that color can’t or
shouldn’t be a significant criterion; in truth, the m arket is filled with
enough solid, affordable machines that you finally have the kind of
freedom of choice previously reserved only for the likes of footwear.”
Computers all used to look pretty much the same. Now they, too, can
be special.
A Salt Lake City grocery shopper praises her superm arket’s
makeover. Gone are the gray stucco exterior, harsh fluorescent light­
ing, and tall, narrow aisles. In their place are warm red brick, spot
and track lighting, and low-rise departments of related items. The
“crowning glory” is the Starbucks in the front, which provides both a
welcoming aroma and a distinctive look and feel. “The experience is
a lot more calm, a lot more pleasant,” she says, “an extraordinary
change, and a welcome one.” Grocery shopping is still a chore, but at
least now the environment offers something special.
A political writer in Washington, D.C., a city noted for its studied
ignorance of style, says he pays much more attention to his clothes
than he did ten or fifteen years ago, and enjoys it a lot more. “One
thing I try to do is not to wear the same combination of suit, shirt,
and tie in a season,” he says. “It’s another way of saying every day is
special.” Once seen as an unnecessary luxury, even a suspect indul­
The Aesthetic Imperative
9
gence, “m aking special” has become a personal, social, and business
imperative.
I low we m ake the world around us special varies widely, and one
m ark of this new age of aesthetics, as opposed to earlier eras notable
for their design creativity, is the coexistence of many different styles.
“Good Design is not about the perfect thing anymore, but about help­
ing a lot of different people build their own personal identities,” says
an influential industrial designer. Modern design was once a value­
laden signal— a sign of ideology. Now it’s just a style, one of many
possible forms of personal aesthetic expression. “Form follows emo­
tion” has supplanted “form follows function.” Emotion tells you
which form you find functional. A chair’s purpose is not to express a
modernist ideal of “chairness” but to please its owner. “The role of
design,” a venture capitalist tells a conference of graphic designers, “is
to m ake life enjoyable.” The designers generally agree.
If modernist design ideology promised efficiency, rationality, and
truth, today’s diverse aesthetics offers a different trifecta: freedom,
beauty, and pleasure (the brand promise, incidentally, of the rapidly
expanding Sephora cosmetics stores). We have replaced “one best
w ay” with “my way, for today,” a more personal and far more fluid
ideal. Individuals differ, and the same person doesn’t always want the
same look and feel. Contrary to some assertions, we have not gone
from a world in which everything must be smooth to one in which
everything must be rough, from an age of only straight edges to an
age of only curves, or from industrialism to primitivism. All these
styles coexist, sharing equal social status.
Nor are we seeing the triumph of “beauty,” defined as a univer­
sal standard, although some observers identify the trend that way.
They argue that the public is now rejecting both the canons of mod­
ernist design and the idea that tastes are personal and subjective.
“Beauty is now proclaimed as being at the heart of a universal
human nature— even at the core of the order of the universe, and
10
The Substance of Style
the essence of life itself,” reports T he W ashington Post, declaring,
“Beauty is back.”
It’s true that artists and critics are more w illing to talk about beau­
ty than they were a half century ago, and that psychologists have
begun to document some aesthetic universals, such as a preference for
symmetry in faces. But it’s absolutely not true that we’ve reached
some sort of consensus on the one best way to aesthetic pleasure.
Quite the contrary. Our aesthetic age is characterized by more variety,
not less. Beauty begins with universals, but its manifestations are het­
erogeneous, subjective, and constantly changing.
Aesthetics offers pleasure, and it signals meaning. It allows per­
sonal expression and social communication. It does not provide con­
sensus, coherence, or truth. Indeed, in many cases the rising
importance of aesthetics sparks conflicts, since one m an’s dream
house is another’s eyesore; one neighbor’s naturally beautiful prairie
garden is another’s patch of weeds. An employer’s idea of the dress
and hairstyles needed to create the right atmosphere for customers
may violate employees’ sense of personal identity or practical func­
tion. Today’s aesthetic imperative represents not the return of a single
standard of beauty, but the increased claims of pleasure and self­
expression. Beauty in its many forms no longer needs justification
beyond the pleasure and meaning it provides. Delighting the senses is
enough: “I like that” rather than “This is good design.”
At the practical level of profit-seeking businesses, the increase in
aesthetic pluralism spurs competition to offer increasing variety. “The
consumer is a chameleon: one day she’s polished, one day she’s tribal,”
says a hair-care-products executive determined to serve both identities.
“It is exciting to see not just one look, but people celebrating their
individuality.” The holy grail of product designers is mass customiza­
tion. Industrial design guru H artm ut Esslinger (the source of “form
follows emotion”) imagines modularly designed products that could
be recombined “to offer 100,000 individual versions,” expressing as
many personal styles. “Mass production offered millions of one thing to
everybody,” writes another design observer, upping the estimate. “Mass
customization offers millions of different models to one guy.”
The Aesthetic Imperative
11
This vision is not just a business strategy. It represents a major ide­
ological shift. Designers and other cultural opinion leaders used to
believe that a single aesthetic standard was righ t— that style was a
manifestation of truth, virtue, even sanity. W hat if someone didn’t
like the fixed way in which W alter Gropius had arranged the furni­
ture in a new H arvard dorm? a student reporter once asked the
Bauhaus architect. “Then they are a neurotic,” Gropius replied. The
idea that aesthetics represented truth and virtue was hardly limited to
design elites, as those of us old enough to recall the culture wars over
m en’s hair lengths can attest.
Today, buzz cuts and ponytails coexist, without a social consensus
and mostly without conflict. Typographers win awards for creating
fonts based on such widely varied styles and sources as Renaissance
Florentine manuscripts and hand-lettered Latino shop signs.
Homeowners mix minimalist contemporary furnishings with antique
Persian rugs. Even the gatekeepers of taste acknowledge and
embrace aesthetic plenitude. They find the old rigidity strange and a
bit embarrassing. “W hen we started American E lle, fashion dictated
that a skirt had to be either one inch above the knee or one inch
below it,” said the m agazine’s publication director in its fifteenth
anniversary issue, published in September 2000. “And if it wasn’t,
then the woman w earing it was out of it, end of story. The beauty of
what’s happening now is that you can be bohemian, minimal, sexy, or
retro. There are so many options— anything goes.”
Maybe not “anything.” E lle’s list of acceptable diversity is still fair­
ly lim ited, and it doesn’t suggest much m ixing and matching across
styles. Other style mavens are more eclectic. The smash-hit magazine
L ucky, launched in December 2000, seeks to offer “fashion options, as
opposed to mandates,” encouraging readers to combine styles to fit
their personal tastes and body types. “I thought there was room for a
m agazine that took the position that many trends could exist sim ul­
taneously,” says L uck y’s creator, who was inspired by the mix-andmatch styles in the 1995 movie C lueless.
The once-rigid aesthetic hierarchy has broken down. Individuals
do not simply imitate their social betters or seek to differentiate them­
12
The Substance of Style
selves from those below them. Personal taste, not an elite imprimatur,
is what matters. A furniture executive talks about an environment
shaped by customers’ “self-assurance.” Consumers are w illing to mix
not only styles but sources. “They have a great sofa or chair,” he says,
“then build around it with everything from high-end accessories to
flea-m arket finds.” Personal expression, personal imagination, per­
sonal initiative— form follows instinct.
The French interiors magazine M aison F rangaise touts customiza­
tion as the “reaction to the homogenization of styles and tastes: the
desire to personalize our universe. We embroider our jeans, paint our
walls, dye our curtains . . . or have others do it for us.” The authori­
tative Larousse dictionary, notes M aison F rangaise, traces the word
cu stom to Americans personalizing their cars. But, fear not, French
designers have given the idea a more ancient and patriotic pedigree.
T hey’ve reappropriated the dictate of Antoine Lavoisier, the great
eighteenth-century chemist: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is
transformed.”
A sort of chemical transformation through recombination is, in
fact, where much of today’s aesthetic plenitude comes from. Like
atoms bouncing about in a boiling solution, aesthetic elements are
bumping into each other, creating new style compounds. We are con­
stantly exposed to new aesthetic material, ripe for recombination,
borrowed from other people’s traditional cultures or contemporary
subcultures. Thanks to media, migration, and cultural pluralism ,
what once was exotic is now familiar.
Some of these subcultural styles begin with an ethnic base—
Indian m eh n di (temporary henna tattoos), African-American hip-hop
styles, New England W ASP preppy clothing, Chinese feng shui, the
vivid colors of Mexico and the Caribbean, the pervasively influential
lines of Japanese art and interiors. Others indicate value-related, vol­
untary associations, “differences with depth,” in the words of cultur­
al anthropologist Grant M cCracken. For such subcultures as goths,
punks, and skaters, he writes, “Differences of fashion, clothing— the
differences of the surface— turned out to indicate differences below,
differences of value and perspective.”
The Aesthetic Imperative
13
W hile subcultures may remain stylistically distinct, elements of
their aesthetics get adopted by people who simply like certain looks
and may combine them in seemingly contradictory ways. Some of
these aesthetic adapters are influential designers or trendsetting
celebrities. Others are unknown individuals looking for ways to
express their own sense of what is beautiful, interesting, or new. As a
result, ethnic styles do not stay in their literal or metaphorical ghettos,
nor do they remain pristine and traditional. Value-laden aesthetics,
such as punk or goth, spill over into mainstream culture as people
outside their subcultures adopt purely aesthetic elements, usually in a
less-extreme form. T hat’s how Chanel’s reddish-black Vamp nail pol­
ish wound up on the hands of stylish women in the mid-nineties, and
how pierced ears ceased to indicate anything definite about men’s sex­
ual orientation. Those narrow European-style glasses say a lot less
about someone today than they did ten years ago.
Ours is a pluralist age, in which styles coexist to please the indi­
viduals who choose them. The “return to beauty” classicists confuse
today’s aesthetic pluralism , which overthrows modernist ideology,
with the banishment of modernist aesthetics. But modernism is not
dead. It is thriving, enjoying a huge upsurge in interest. Modernist
furnishings, from Art Deco to midcentury styles, have become
sought-after antiques, and modernist buildings are the latest cause for
preservationists. Contemporary designers continue to use modernist
motifs, along with many other influences, to create new objects and
environments. Some modernist experiments were certainly aesthetic
failures, but the modernists created many beautiful things. Their for­
mal breakthroughs continue to inspire delight.
Although clever allusions still have their place, the breakdown of
modernist ideology means that it’s no longer necessary to hide aes­
thetic pleasure behind postmodern irony and camp. Even mod­
ernism ’s advocates have abandoned its confining strictures. “Instead
of finding a style and adhering to its tenets, modern design allows
you to grapple with your own ideas about how you want to live,”
writes the publisher of D w ell, an architecture and interiors m agazine
first published in 2000.
14
The Substance of Style
D w ell’s editor in chief preaches a pluralism that would sound
strange to her forebears: “We think of ourselves as Modernists, but we
are the nice Modernists. One of the things we like best about
Modernism— the nice Modernism— is its flexibility.” She tweaks the
puritanical doctrines of Adolf Loos— “one crabby Modernist”—
whose influential 1908 essay “Ornament and C rim e” proclaimed
decoration degenerate, the amoral indulgence of children and bar­
barians. To a contemporary reader, Loos sounds like a racist, pleasurehating totalitarian. In the twenty-first century, ornament is not crime.
It is an essential form of human self-expression.
And what an expressive age ours is. The signs are all around us. A
few have become cultural cliches: Apple’s iMac turns the personal
computer from a utilitarian, putty-colored box into curvy, translucent
eye candy— blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape. Translucent
jewel tones spread to staplers and surge protectors, microwaves and
mice. Apple reinvents its designs in touchable pearly whites.
Target introduces a line of housewares developed by architectdesigner Michael Graves. Few Target customers have heard of
Graves, but his playful toaster quickly becomes the chain’s most pop­
ular, and most expensive, model. A year later, Target doubles the
number of Graves offerings, to more than five hundred products.
Over time, it adds even more.
Volkswagen reinvents the Beetle. Karim Rashid reinvents the
trash can. Oxo reinvents the potato peeler. People will pay an extra
five bucks for a little kitchen tool that looks and feels good. Show
them something cool or pretty, and they’ll replace wastebaskets
they’ve never thought twice about.
For every well-publicized touchstone there are dozens of surprises— credit cards, for instance. Nordstrom issues shiny holo­
graphic credit cards to spice up its brand. “The look of the card made
it more special,” explains a spokeswoman. PayPal, the online pay­
ments service, entices customers with see-through Visa cards in five
different colors. I present my American Express Blue card at a hotel
The Aesthetic Imperative
15
and get a common reaction: “Wow. W here did you get it? ” The com­
pany, proud of its cool card, dubs that response the “clerk double­
take.”
Reflecting the demand for products that stand out, the number of
industrial designers employed in the United States jumps 32 percent
in five years. Design schools are so full of students they can hardly
find faculty to staff the courses. “W e’re seeing design creep into
everything, ev er y th in g ,” says the former president of the Industrial
Designers Society of America. The post-nineties recession is just a
“speed bump” in a long-run trend.
“Km art goes under,” he says, “and all anybody cares about is
M artha Stewart. Target doesn’t have enough with Michael Graves.
They have to hire Philippe Starck, the most famous designer in the
world.” B usiness Week was wrong to declare the 1990s the age of
design. “The nineties were clearly the age of distribution, and W alM art coming to the fore,” he says. H igh-style products like the iMac
and Beetle didn’t appear until the very end of the decade. “I see 2000
to 2010 as the decade of design.”
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens an exhibit of
sneakers. Guitars are art in Boston; motorcycles are art in New York.
Museums in M iami and La Jolla display household objects, from
chairs to salad bowls. To the consternation of critics, an exhibit of
Arm ani couture draws swarms of visitors to the Guggenheim in
New York. The definition of “art” has changed. But so has the defi­
nition of sneakers and salad bowls. W e expect the most mundane
products to provide not only function but aesthetic pleasure and
meaning. “Design has become the public art of our time,” says a cura­
tor and designer.
A T im e cover story hails “The Rebirth of Design,” declaring that
“America is bowled over by style.” Not just America. The new age of
aesthetics is a worldwide phenomenon, found throughout the devel­
oped nations, most strikingly in the once-plain and pragmatic
English-speaking world. “The Style W ars,” reads a cover line on the
Sydney S un-H erald’s Sunday magazine. “Once upon a time, sofas
were for sitting on and kettles were for m aking tea. But all that’s
16
The Substance of Style
changed now.” Five new Australian home and lifestyle magazines
started publishing in 2000 alone, bringing the total there to more than
twenty.
Aesthetic creativity is as vital, and as indicative of economic and
social progress, as technological innovation. In Turkey, interior
design is flourishing; the number of magazines on the subject has
jumped from one to forty in a decade. Young people are recovering
Ottoman artifacts and aesthetics, fusing them with Asian and
Western influences. Istanbul, says a Turkish architect who returned
there from New York, is “very dynamic, and hungry for progress.
H ungry to catch up with London and New York as a capital of
design.”
Japan, whose traditional styles have long been a source of aesthet­
ic inspiration worldwide, is fast becoming “the real international cap­
ital of fashion,” writes Amy Spindler, the influential style editor of
T he N ew York T im es M agazine. It’s the place where aesthetic change
for its own sake dominates popular culture. “Unlike with the London
punks and mods, or the New York rappers who so inspire dress in
the streets of Japan’s capital, there are no politics behind the Tokyo
fashion movements. The punk movement, when it came, was only
about fashion. The hip-hop movement has nothing to do with rebel­
lion. . . . As central as fashion is to life here, all it really says is that the
person w earing it loves fashion.” Along with the clothing styles that
attract New York editors, Japan exports new aesthetic concepts
through animation and industrial design.
As recently as 1970, Japan had no design schools. Neither did
South Korea or Singapore, which have also become centers of design.
Today, Japan has at least nine design schools, South Korea at least ten,
and Singapore at least four. To boost the country’s industrial design
capacity, the South Korean government is establishing more special­
ized schools and design departments within existing universities.
Even Italy, by many measures a design superpower, offered no
degrees in design, as opposed to architecture, before Domus
Academy opened in 1983. Today, at least twenty-three schools grant
design degrees. Since 1995, more than forty design and architecture
The Aesthetic Imperative
17
magazines (excluding graphic design publications) have begun pub­
lishing worldwide.
Graphic design has grown along with product and environmental
design. In the early seventies, the American Institute of Graphic Arts,
the professional association for graphic designers, had 1,700 members.
“And 1,350 lived or worked between Fourteenth Street and Eightyfifth Street in M anhattan,” says a longtime member. Now there are
15,000 members— double the number in 1995— and dozens of chap­
ters all over the country. That growth in part reflects organizational
vitality, but the profession as a whole is indeed flourishing. There are
about 150,000 graphic designers in the country, estimates the AIGA’s
executive director. A generation ago, he says, his counterparts would
have optimistically told a reporter there were 30,000 and “believed
there were only 15,000.” W orldwide, at least fifty graphic design
magazines publish regularly; in 1970, there were three.
Demand for professional graphic design has increased along with
do-it-yourself capability. Word processors and PowerPoint are teach­
ing everyone about typefaces and bullet points. Digital cameras, lowcost scanners, and ink-jet printers make four-color illustrated
documents cheap and easy. In 1999, K inko’s launched a $40 million
campaign to convince customers that everyday communication
requires polished graphics: “Sometimes it’s not just what you say, but
how you say it.” Maids looking for housecleaning jobs hand out flyers
that feature attractive layouts, clip art, and typefaces once reserved for
design professionals. Staid law firms hire graphic designers to create
a unique and consistent look and feel for everything from stationery
to Web sites, including such once-unthinkable elements as corporate
logos. The plain typed resume or company newsletter is as obsolete as
carbon paper. “There’s no such thing as an undesigned graphic object
anymore,” says graphic designer Michael Bierut, former president of
the AIGA board, “and there used to be.”
Contrary to T im e, it’s m isleading to call the trend “design.”
Designers worry as much about function as about form, and they
stubbornly resist being treated as mere “stylists.” Yet when a GE
Plastics executive says that “aesthetics, or styling, has become an
18
The Substance of Style
accepted unique selling point,” he is not talking about recent break­
throughs in the cleaning power of toothbrush-bristle arrangements or
the ergonomics of desk chairs. Nor is he addressing the ideological
meanings that designers invoke in the manifestos that bring prestige
within their profession. H e’s saying that surfaces matter, in and of
themselves.
Talking about “design” also inevitably focuses attention on prod­
ucts, with occasional nods to hotel interiors. Even graphic design
usually gets left out. The T im e cover story is illustrated with pic­
tures of housewares and electronic gizmos. Every single person it
quotes, except boutique hotelier Ian Schrager, is in the business of
designing, displaying, or selling ob jects. T hat’s what “design” means
to most people— cars, computers, toothbrushes, housewares, clothes,
furniture.
The boom in product design is just one sign of the increasing
importance of sensory content in every aspect of life. Real estate
agents hire “stagers” to redecorate homes for sale. New home owners
can then use “move-in coordinators” to unpack and arrange their
things in a visually appealing way. Aesthetically ambitious suburban­
ites engage professionals to adorn their houses for Christmas. Busy
professional couples hire chefs to come in and m ake dinner, provid­
ing not only good food but the textures and smells of home cooking.
Business executives enlist Hollywood stylists to dress them. M aking
people, places, and things look good is a growth business.
Or consider the change observed by Pierluigi Zappacosta, a
founder of Logitech, the computer peripherals company best known
for its mice. Zappacosta has his own place in design history; by hiring
H artm ut Esslinger’s design firm, frog, to create Logitech’s product
and packaging designs, he injected a playful, distinctive style into the
dull world of computer peripherals. But the most vivid stories
Zappacosta tells about aesthetics have nothing to do with computers.
T hey’re about food.
W hen he came to Palo Alto from Italy in 1976, Zappacosta was
baffled by American meals— no good bread, no good cheese, no good
coffee. “It seemed like something was fundamentally wrong,” he
The Aesthetic Imperative
19
says. If the food was bad, the atmosphere of restaurants was even
weirder. “You could not eat, except in the dark,” he says, recalling
going from the blinding sun into pitch-dark business lunches. “I
don’t know how much it has to do with food and how much it has to
do with the concept of decor. But if it was a nice restaurant, you
couldn’t see what you were eating.”
All that has changed. Just as competition from Microsoft spurred
Logitech to beautify its mouse, so grocery and restaurant entrepre­
neurs have pushed up standards for food and restaurant design. Some
were immigrants re-creating the good taste of their homelands.
Others were American-born innovators, creating such oddities as
“California roll” sushi and barbecue-chicken pizza. Today, marvels
Zappacosta, you not only can get good bread in Silicon Valley, but a
local grocery has a thirty-foot-long aisle filled with cheeses from all
over the world— far more variety than you’d find in an Italian m ar­
ket. Dark restaurants aren’t classy but old-fashioned.
Our generic standards have ratcheted up from Pizza H ut to
California Pizza Kitchen, from TGI F riday’s as trendy urban inno­
vator in the 1970s to TGI F riday’s as everyday suburban fare. “Black­
Eyed Pea used to be a high-design restaurant,” says an architect who
specializes in restaurant design. The chain, which serves home-style
Southern food, was one of the first to hire professionals to create its
atmosphere. “It used to be unique and kind of fashion-forward.
People would talk about, ‘Have you seen the Black-Eyed Pea?’ That’s
not the case anymore.” Design that was once cutting edge is now a
m inimum standard, taken for granted by customers.
C ontrary to all the stories about product design, a better indicator of
our aesthetic age than the splashily designed objects on store shelves is
the evolution of the en viron m en ts that surround them, and us.
Industrial design is unquestionably enjoying a new golden age, but
the look and feel of at least some leading products has been important
since the late 1920s. As a widespread phenomenon, meticulous atten­
tion to environments is much newer. “Design is everywhere, and
20
The Substance of Style
everywhere is now designed,” says David Brown, the former Art
Center president, with only a little exaggeration.
W ith its carefully conceived mix of colors and textures, aromas
and music, Starbucks is more indicative of our era than the iMac. It is
to the age of aesthetics what McDonald’s was to the age of conven­
ience or Ford was to the age of mass production— the touchstone suc­
cess story, the exemplar of all that is good and bad about the aesthetic
imperative. Hotels, shopping malls, libraries, even churches seek to
emulate Starbucks. Curmudgeons may grouse about the price of its
coffee, but Starbucks isn’t just selling beverages. It’s delivering a multisensory aesthetic experience, for which customers are w illing to pay
several times what coffee costs at a purely functional Formica-andlinoleum coffee shop (much less a 7-Eleven or D unkin’ Donuts). The
company employs scores of designers to keep its stores’ “design language”— color palettes, upholstery textures, light fixtures, brochure
paper, graphic motifs— fresh and distinctive.
“Every Starbucks store is carefully designed to enhance the qual­
ity of everything the customers see, touch, hear, smell, or taste,” writes
CEO Howard Schultz. “All the sensory signals have to appeal to the
same high standards. The artwork, the music, the aromas, the sur­
faces all have to send the same subliminal message as the flavor of the
coffee: E verythin g h ere is b est-of-cla ss.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Starbucks has a specific look and feel. But it’s not alone in either
the message it wants to send or the sensory techniques it uses to send
it. W ithin a generation, the floors of shopping malls have gone from
concrete to tile to marble. Truck stops and turnpike rest areas are hir­
ing architects to create airy, light oases. Designer bathrooms have
become de rigueur in upscale restaurants. Once windowless boxes,
new self-storage centers look like antebellum plantation homes or
luxury hotels. Factories incorporate more open space and natural
light, and businesses make relocation decisions based in part on aes­
thetic amenities. M uzak has dumped its infamous elevator music in
favor of recordings by original artists, with programs crafted to pro­
duce just the right atmosphere for a customer’s environment.
Trade show booths today emulate theme parks and W orld’s Fairs,
The Aesthetic Imperative
21
striving to be “immersive environments” rather than mere product
displays. Lighting, sound, and textures convey not only information
but the right mood. The goal, writes an exhibit designer, is to create
“a complete environment— one that gets inside the minds of the
attendees and triggers the right feelings.” Form follows, and leads,
emotion.
People have always decorated their homes. But the aesthetic qual­
ity and variety of home interiors have increased dramatically.
Furnishings once reserved for rich aficionados are now the stuff of
middle-class life. In the early 1990s, when Pottery Barn launched its
interiors-oriented catalog, American home owners could not buy a
wrought-iron curtain rod without hiring an interior designer. “We
had to go to a little iron shop in Wisconsin and teach them how to
m ake a curtain rod,” recalls H ilary Billings, who turned the Pottery
Barn catalog into a home-furnishings source for the aesthetically
aspiring middle class, a niche that rival Crate and Barrel also filled.
Now such once-exotic offerings can be found in discount stores.
“Crate and Barrel changed the world,” says Brown, “and then Target
changed it again.”
In a 1976 Vogue article, a designer praised a Manhattan high-rise
for m illionaire jet-setters by saying, “Luxury of the bathroom is ter­
rific—marble floor and walls and nicely designed chrome fixtures.”
Twenty-five years later, new tract-home bathrooms come with marble
floors, and do-it-yourselfers replace ho-hum designer chrome with
brushed-nickel faucets once restricted “to the trade.” Large home
builders open design centers where buyers can choose from hundreds
of porcelain, stone, and marble tiles, dozens of different sinks, and well
over a thousand carpets, customizing their mass-produced homes.
Home-improvement shows are booming on television, offering
not just do-it-yourself handyman advice but designers’ aesthetic
expertise. Seventy million U.S. households get Home & Garden
Television, “the CNN of its niche,” which also runs in Canada, Japan,
Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The Learning Channel’s
Trading Spaces room-makeover show, a knockoff of the British hit
C hangin g R oom s, draws 3 million to 5 million viewers a week, sets
22
The Substance of Style
audience records for the networks, usually placing among cable’s top
ten shows. Producers get between three hundred and five hundred
unsolicited applications a day from home owners who’d like to par­
ticipate. The shows keep proliferating. BBC designers now redo gar­
dens on G round F orce and, using only what residents already have on
hand, make over entire homes on H ouse Invaders. On T L C ’s W hile
Your W ere Out and its sister Discovery Channel’s Surprise by D esign,
spouses and friends surprise a home owner with a redecorated room.
M TV makes over teens’ rooms in rock-star style on Crib Crashers.
“Home-improvement television has gone from being an oddity
very much on the fringe to being very m ainstream ,” says a veteran
host. “Our society’s willingness to spend our time and money on
homes is much greater, whether it’s a condominium or a house on the
water.” Membership in the American Society of Interior Designers
has more than doubled since 1992, rising to about twenty thousand
from nine thousand.
A new art m arket has developed: upscale wall decor. Artists and
art collectors have long mocked the idea that someone m ight pur­
chase a work to go with a couch— an insult to serious art. Perhaps as
a result, the wall decor industry has been the home of generic, cliched
prints. But not all visually sophisticated consumers want art to
impress their friends, hobnob with the gallery crowd, or make money
as an investment. Some just want a more attractive living room. In
response, an unsnobbish middle m arket is offering prints and photo­
graphs to go with stylish furniture.
Many of the featured artists are well-known modern or contem­
porary names. Eyestorm, which started as a specialized Web site and
branched out into stores, offers limited-edition prints by Damien
H irst at $3,000 each, and a photo of Andy W arhol by Dennis Hopper
for $500. Serving the same need, Crate and Barrel sells framed repro­
ductions of M ark Rothko paintings for $499. Sales are grow ing at
double-digit rates. Customers are “buying for aesthetics, not collect­
ing,” says an Eyestorm executive. T hey’re treating art not as an
investment or status symbol but simply as a way to create a beautiful
home environment.
The Aesthetic Imperative
23
As aesthetic standards rise in private homes, public places feel
pressure to upgrade their own look and feel. Elaborating on the tech­
niques of one-of-a-kind boutique hotels, Starwood Hotels & Resorts
has adopted a strategy of “w inning by design.” Its upscale W chain
gets the most attention, but the big news is in the m idm arket.
Starwood is ridding Sheraton and Westin rooms of cheesy floral bed­
spreads, plastic veneer furniture, and tacky ice buckets. It, too, is buy­
ing better art. “If you wouldn’t have it in your house, why should we
give it to a guest?” is the motto, and the hotelier’s design choices
reflect rising standards at home. Bathroom mirrors get frames, and
countertops go granite. Sheraton rooms feature sleigh beds and
accent walls. Three customers a day ask, unsolicited, how they can
buy W estin’s all-white, ultracomfortable “heavenly bed.”
Airport terminals are remodeling with skylights, panoramic
views, art galleys, custom carpeting or terrazzo floors, and high-end
shops. W olfgang Puck Cafes and Starbucks have replaced hot dogs
and stale coffee. New airport spas offer manicures and massages to
travelers with time to k ill. At La Guardia, the Figs restaurant serves
such gourmet dishes as Italian panini sandwiches and fig-and-prosciutto flatbread pizza. At Chicago’s O’Hare, travelers changing con­
courses walk beneath a 744-foot neon-light sculpture, its colors
rippling in sync with music. At art-filled Albany airport, which
opened its remodeled term inal in 1998, the security checkpoints
match the cafe chairs— blond and cherry woods with a decorative
grid of brushed stainless steel and copper-colored backing. Only the
actual conveyor belt would look out of place in a Starbucks. “If
Americans are going to spend more time in airports, it’s incumbent
upon us to make them attractive places,” says the former mayor of
Philadelphia, who made upgrading the city’s airport a major project.
And that was before added security precautions extended airport
waits.
Shopping malls, once designed to be functional and convenient,
with little attention to atmosphere, are turning to aesthetics to try to
hold customers who m ight otherwise prefer drive-up “lifestyle cen­
ters.” New malls have “grand portals” and attractive landscaping on
24
The Substance of Style
the outside, soft seating and decorative lighting fixtures on the inside.
Older malls are remodeling. “The original shopping centers were
extremely durable but not necessarily the kind of places you’d like to
linger in,” says the chief designer at a large mall developer. As recent­
ly as the 1980s, he explains, malls “were rational and functional
designs that were to be convenient and efficient. They were more or
less ‘machines for shopping.’ ”
Not so today. At the Beverly Center, a twenty-year-old mall in Los
Angeles, the new central court features a backlit, three-story “shoji
screen” with panels in subtle blues and yellows representing the col­
ors of the California landscape and sky. A new patio off the food
court gives visitors a view of the Hollywood H ills, while sofas and
chairs throughout the corridors invite people to linger. The goal, says
the m all’s general manager, was to create a place “where people
would spend the day, not come in on their mission and turn around
and go somewhere else for their social environment.”
T he most dramatic indicators of the new aesthetic age relate not to
product design or environments, but to personal appearance— the
crossroads of individual expression, social expectations, and universal
aesthetic standards. In a 2001 report titled L ook ing Good, S oun ding
R ight: S tyle C oun selling in th e N ew E conom y, a British consulting and
research group writes that employees’ looks are no longer simply an
advantage to their personal careers but “a highly marketable asset for
employers.” The importance of “aesthetic skills” has grown along
with lifestyle-oriented service businesses, in which aesthetic environ­
ments attract customers and good-looking employees function as
“human hardw are,” enhancing the company image.
A British boutique hotel chain, for instance, hires only attractive
employees (with good personalities). It then gives each new staff mem­
ber ten days of grooming and deportment training, including indi­
vidual makeovers and shaving lessons. In today’s economy, argues the
report, training programs for the unemployed need to emphasize aes­
thetics as much as other skills: “W hy should the m iddle class, profes­
The Aesthetic Imperative
25
sionals, and politicians be the only ones to m ake use of the imagem akers?” Following that logic, StyleWorks, a New York-based non­
profit group, uses volunteer hairstylists, makeup artists, and image
consultants to provide “a fresh new look for a fresh new start” to
women moving from welfare to work. Founded in 1999, StyleWorks
gave makeovers and style counseling to about one thousand clients in
its first two years.
As recent elections demonstrate, the politicians also need their
image makers. From Al Gore’s earth-tone suits to Florida Secretary
of State Katherine H arris’s heavy makeup, coverage of the 2000 U.S.
presidential race seemed obsessed with appearances. For the first time
ever, the Gallup Organization polled people on which presidential
candidate was better looking (Gore won, 44 percent to 24 percent).
The question was worth asking because the answer wasn’t obvious.
Both candidates were way above average. Contemplating the politics
of cuteness, a W ashington Post writer declared, “Presidentially, the
United States is now in a place called H unksville.”
In her Senate-race victory speech, H illary Clinton gave credit to
her “six black pants suits.” W hen she showed up on Capitol H ill
looking plump and frumpy, critics opined that she’d hit a “glamour
spiral.” W hen Gore reemerged on the political scene in August 2001,
all pundits could talk about was his salt-and-pepper beard.
Speculation about 2004 Democratic contenders inevitably mentions
the good looks of Senators John Kerry and John Edwards. P eop le
m agazine even dubbed Edwards the nation’s “sexiest politician.”
The 2001 British election concentrated even more blatantly on the
candidates’ looks. “The underlying topic of the General Election,”
wrote a Tory commentator, “was not tax and spend, boom or bust,
saving the pound and snatching Britain from the gaping, salivating
m aw of Europe, but hair, and [Tory candidate W illiam ] H ague’s dis­
tressing lack of it.” H ague’s looks were universally declared a major
political problem, before and after he was trounced by Tony Blair.
“The general view is that he looks a lot like a fetus in a suit,” said an
old friend and ally. Shortly after becoming H ague’s successor as Tory
leader, the equally bald Iain Duncan Smith proceeded to attack Blair
26
The Substance of Style
on the hair issue. “H e’s losing it pretty rapidly and brushes it like a
teased W eetabix,” he said. “If having a head of hair is the qualifica­
tion for being Premier, w e’ll have to rule out the current PM in a
year’s tim e.”
Good hair, by contrast, is a political asset. Japanese prime minister
Junichiro K oizum i’s permed “Lion K ing” mane boosted his popular­
ity and helped reinforce his image as an iconoclastic reformer.
German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose thick brown hair
gives him a youthful appearance, actually went to court over a pub­
lished allegation that he dyes his hair to keep out the gray. He won an
injunction against future hair-coloring claims. W ith dramatic cos­
tum ing sense and the right headgear, however, even a bald politician
can win style plaudits. “The chic-est man on earth,” according to
fashion designer Tom Ford, is Afghan leader Ham id Karzai.
Handsome political leaders reflect a more general phenomenon.
Spared not only the disfiguring diseases and malnutrition of earlier
centuries but the crooked teeth, acne scars, and gray hair of our par­
ents and grandparents, the people of the industrialized countries are
arguably the best-looking people in history. We live less physically
dem anding lives, which can lead to obesity but also keeps us young.
It’s no longer the case, as a nineteenth-century visitor wrote, that “the
bloom of an American lady is gone” at twenty-one and by thirty “the
whole fabric is in decay.” Baby boomers expect to look young and
attractive well into their fifties, and many do.
W hile only the genetically blessed can be extraordinary beauties,
more and more of us qualify as what historian Arthur M arwick calls
“personable”— generally good-looking if we care to be. At the same
time, we have the chance to see many more truly beautiful people
than our ancestors, thanks to a combination of media, travel, and
population density. An hour watching television, flipping through
magazines, or driving down billboard-lined streets exposes us to
more beautiful people, of more different types, than most of our fore­
bears would have seen in a lifetime. That means we make more
exacting judgments, about ourselves as well as others. “Only when
people have the opportunity to m ake choices and comparisons can
The Aesthetic Imperative
27
they m ake a genuine evaluation of personal appearance,” writes
M arwick.
Those judgments extend to areas where personal appearance was
once considered irrelevant, even unseemly, to call attention to.
Authors on both sides of the Atlantic are starting to notice, and some­
times complain, that their looks are almost as important as their w rit­
ing. “Looks sell books,” reports T he W ashington Post. “It’s a
closed-door secret in contemporary American publishing, but the
word is leaking out. Not that you have to resemble Denzel
Washington or Cameron Diaz, but if you can write well an d you pos­
sess the haute cheekbones of Susan Minot, the delicate mien of Amy
Tan or the brooding ruggedness of Sebastian Junger, your chances are
much greater.”
In Britain, publishers aren’t as shy about admitting the importance
of the “gorge factor”— How gorgeous is the w riter?— especially for
new authors. Acclaimed young novelist Zadie Smith, author of W hite
T eeth, even underwent a publisher-pleasing makeover, changing her
hairstyle and getting rid of her glasses. “I didn’t see too many W hite
Teeth reviews without a photograph,” says the company’s publishing
director. “Looks do m ake a difference, we all know that.”
If all this emphasis on appearance represents bad news for those of
us who’d just as soon be judged on other criteria, the good news is
that the same influences have led to a broader definition of attrac­
tiveness. Exposure to the way many different people look raises beau­
ty standards, but it also teaches us that beauty, while a recognizable
universal, comes in different types— variations of build, skin color,
hair color, and so on. On top of the natural variations, we add artifi­
cial ones, matters of style that imitate or expand on nature. The result
of higher beauty standards and more stylistic variety is an explosion
of activity designed to produce better-looking, or more aesthetically
interesting, people. Here, too, ornament is no longer a crime.
The number of nail salons in the United States has nearly doubled
in a decade, while the number of manicurists has tripled. The market
for skin-care “beauty therapists” and aestheticians, long strong on the
European continent, is booming in the United States and Britain.
28
The Substance of Style
Tattoos have ceased to be taboo. H air coloring is virtually mandatory.
Nearly three-quarters of middle-aged women (ages forty-five to fiftyfour) polled by the American Association of Retired Persons say they
dye their hair to cover gray. So do 13 percent of m iddle-aged men.
U.S. hair coloring sales topped $1.1 billion in 2001, up 34 percent
since 1997.
The trend is international. Sixty percent of the women in Japan
and South Korea color their hair, between 30 percent and 40 percent
in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In 2002, Japan Airlines
changed its policies to allow flight attendants to have subtly colored
hair; previously only naturally black hair was allowed. “Nowadays if
you don’t color your hair, you’re the one who’s different,” says a
Singapore fashion-magazine editor.
“H air-dyeing used to be driven by negative motivations like hid­
ing gray hair,” says a hair-coloring executive in Japan, where sales
doubled from 1991 to 2001. “But today, people have come to view
hair coloring as a form of self-expression.” A Tokyo business analyst
compares the rapid adoption of hair coloring to a more widely recog­
nized Japanese trend: “The two biggest changes in the Japanese m ar­
ket in the last decade have been mobile phones and the color of
Japanese hair.”
Coloring adds depth and highlights to dull hair and makes artifi­
cial blondness so common it has become, in the words of one fashion
critic, “just one of the many attractive ways to adorn dark hair.”
Clairol aims its Herbal Essences True Intense Color at men and
women ages eighteen to thirty-four. Young people, says an executive,
tend to be “very experim ental” and “want to express themselves and
their own individuality.”
W hen L’Oreal launched its Feria line of hair colors in the summer
of 1998, it showcased a blond shade on a youthful model with a short
Afro and milk-chocolate complexion. Even more audaciously, a
Clairol ad shows two black-clad redheads, one with pale skin, the
other deep brown: “Believe it or not— w e’re the same color,” reads
the headline, ostensibly referring to the Clairol product. W hat once
would have been a problematic statement about race is now purely
The Aesthetic Imperative
29
aesthetic. And artificiality is no longer suspect. Does she or doesn’t
she? Of course she does. In the next ad, she’ll have yet another hair
color. “The brand is about breaking the rules of hair color and using
it like a cosmetic,” a L’Oreal executive says of Feria.
Young men constitute a rapidly growing m arket for hair coloring,
with U.S. sales up 25 percent in five years. Teen boys in the United
States spend about 5 percent of their income on hair color. “If you
have the fashion, you have the girls,” says a teenager whose mother
helps him keep his hair tipped blond. Too young to worry about gray,
young men are looking for excitement and self-expression. “I have
this mousy brown hair, and I never felt it represented who I was,”
says a twenty-six-year-old Canadian man, whose hair color has
ranged from jet black to champagne blond. “I see m yself as more col­
orful and more interesting.” A Brisbane, Australia, salon owner
reports that twenty to thirty men a week come in for hair color, many
inspired by pop star Ricky M artin’s tinted locks. “In the old days,
you didn’t color your h air,” he says. “Now it’s just being fashion­
conscious.”
Since the 1980s, w e’ve also experienced what cultural critic
Jonathan Rauch dubs the “Buff Revolution.” For the first time in
centuries, it has become respectable for people in Anglo-American
countries to pay attention to m en’s bodies. “Suddenly,” writes Rauch,
“there were half a dozen physique magazines on every 7-Eleven
newsstand. Suddenly buses prowled through the cities bearing ads in
which, for no discernible reason, a barechested young man with a
chiseled and tanned and shaved-down torso displayed a microwave
oven (a microwave oven?).”
Rauch finds this revolution generally a good thing, despite some
excesses. Others worry that m en’s grow ing concern with their looks
is, to quote a magazine headline, “Turning Boys into Girls.” Feminist
Susan Faludi assails “ornamental culture” for its baleful effects on
m en’s self-esteem. Books with titles like T he Adonis C omplex and
L ook ing G ood fret that men are hurting their physical and psycho­
logical health in pursuit of their aesthetic ideals.
For both men and women, the boundary between health and
30
The Substance of Style
beauty, medicine and cosmetics, is m elting away. Pharmaceuticals
promise to grow hair on men’s heads and slow its growth on women’s
upper lips. “Enjoy beautiful eye color change even if your vision is
perfect,” suggests an ad for contact lenses. From 1992 to 2001, the
number of patients having cosmetic medical procedures in the United
States nearly quintupled, from 413,000 to 1.9 million. Sixty percent of
American women and 35 percent of men say they’d have cosmetic
surgery if it were safe, free, and undetectable; younger people are
more likely to say yes, suggesting a generational shift in attitudes.
H aving prevented or cured most tooth diseases, dentists now
bombard prospective patients with mailers selling cosmetic services—
bonding and whitening for younger-looking smiles. U.S. and
Canadian orthodontists claimed 5 million patients in 2000, up from
3.5 million in 1989. “The dental profession’s traditional domain, cen­
tered around the eradication of disease, now finds itself on the thresh­
old of uncharted territory: the enhancement of appearance,” declares
a cover article in T he Jo u rn a l o f th e A m erican D en tal A ssociation. A
journalist evaluating tooth-whiteners notes that the products “are
primed to be the next deodorant: a once-optional form of personal
hygiene that’s now simply an obligation. It’s only a matter of time
because the more of us who get whitened, the grungier your
unwhitened teeth w ill appear in contrast.”
Dermatologists zap age spots with lasers and prevent acne with
drugs. Doctors declare teenage acne scars a thing of the past, as
unnecessary as measles or crooked teeth. In 2001, more than 111,000
Americans under eighteen availed themselves of chemical peels,
while another 55,000 submitted to microdermabrasion. Such skin
treatments also raise beauty standards. W ith new preventive drugs
and remedies available, says a teenager, “Now, if you have some bad
acne, it really stands out.”
\/V hile all this activity has been going on in the economic and social
world, two big waves of scholarship have directed intellectual atten­
tion toward aesthetics. Scholars in the relatively new field of “mate­
The Aesthetic Imperative
31
rial culture” study the interactions among style, commerce, and per­
sonal identity. This research reflects what Grant McCracken calls
“the long-standing anthropological conviction that m aterial culture
makes culture material, i.e., that the expressions of a lifestyle are more
than mere reflections of it; that, in some cases, they are its substance,
and that, in all cases, they give it substance.” The m aterial— and
hence the aesthetic— matters to people’s sense of self. It isn’t just sur­
face and illusion. And it is worthy of serious study.
Feminist historians are uncovering and analyzing women’s beauty
culture and domestic taste, challenging the twentieth-century dogmas
that declared ornamentation inherently decadent, corrupt, or m anip­
ulative, and markets inherently exploitive. “W hy were there no seri­
ous books on refrigerators and cars?” Penny Sparke, a design
historian, recalls wondering. “W hy was there so much work available
about architecture and so little about interiors? . . . Feminine culture,
linked with the everyday, the commercial and the aesthetically
‘im pure,’ had been relegated to the m argins.” T hat’s no longer true,
as Sparke’s own work demonstrates.
Journals with names like Fashion T heory (first published in 1997)
and Jo u rn a l o f D esign H istory engage these topics, among others.
Academic presses publish works on the history and m eaning of dress
and of dishes. Art museums are beefing up their design and clothes
collections, and scholars are analyzing the culture and history of fash­
ion. Books on the evolution of shopping and store environments, pro
and con, are increasingly common. E nterprise & S ociety, a businesshistory journal founded in 2000, devoted one of its first issues to
“beauty and business,” focusing on commerce and personal appear­
ance.
One result of this new inquiry, quips a reviewer, is that “the new
term for an overflowing wardrobe is ‘archive’; rum m aging through
your cast-offs has become a form of research, and, if you have
shopped wisely, your archive may deserve an exhibition of its own.”
In 2000, a New York professor did in fact donate her collection of
Perry Ellis clothing to the Fashion Institute of Technology’s museum.
Many natural and social scientists, meanwhile, are increasingly
32
The Substance of Style
interested in the nature of aesthetic universals. W hile the materialculture scholars ponder the value and social creation of aesthetic
meaning, these researchers want to understand the biological origins
of aesthetic pleasure. Their scholarship challenges the received aca­
demic wisdom that tastes are as different as languages, that the art of
one culture is incomprehensible to the previously unexposed people
of another. In fact, languages themselves begin with universals. So,
apparently, do aesthetic responses. As a result, aesthetic elements can
spread relatively easily from culture to culture. Although context and
m eaning can vary widely, and specific tastes may differ from indi­
vidual to individual, human beings don’t have that much trouble
appreciating the pleasures of otherwise foreign aesthetics.
Psychologists have found patterns of symmetry and proportion,
consistency and surprise, that cross cultures and ages. Even infants,
they’ve discovered, distinguish between attractive and unattractive
faces. Across fields and in different countries, good-looking people
earn more, report economists, and good looks are at least as impor­
tant economically for men as for women. “Musics cross-culturally are
very different from one another,” says Denis Dutton, a professor of
aesthetics with a particular interest in the relation between biology
and art. “But musics depend on sounds, on pitch, on harmonies, on
iterations— getting tired of something, being surprised. Novelty, sur­
prise, echoing effects, repeating of themes, variations of themes— in
all developed musics you find these things happening.” Languages
differ in how finely they distinguish colors, but some categories are
found just about everywhere: the “focal colors” of white, black, red,
green, yellow, and blue. No culture names only orange and puce. The
combinations vary, but the component building blocks are universal.
Evolutionary theorists postulate explanations for these patterns,
based on survival and sexual selection. “Our response to beauty is
hard-w ired— governed by circuits in the brain shaped by natural
selection,” writes psychologist Nancy Etcoff. “We love smooth skin,
symmetrical bodies, thick shiny hair, a wom an’s curved waist and a
m an’s sculpted pectorals, because in the course of evolution the people
who noticed these signals had more reproductive success. We are
The Aesthetic Imperative
33
their descendants.” Of course, biology also differs somewhat from
individual to individual, which may explain why I prefer brunets
while you like blonds— a preference for exogamy has positive genet­
ic effects— or why I respond strongly to bright colors while you pre­
fer pastels. W ithin the universal patterns are individual variations. In
addition, the universal patterns of novelty and surprise lead to differ­
ent results depending on what a particular person is already accus­
tomed to.
The analysts of ephemeral material culture and the seekers of bio­
logically based universals often seem at odds. But they in fact com­
plement each other. Both are necessary to fully understand the role of
aesthetics in human life, to explain both pleasure and meaning.
Together, they tell us that aesthetics is neither a natural absolute nor a
complete social construct. It interweaves nature and culture. The evo­
lution of taste operates on timescales that range from gene-shaping
eons to fad-and-fashion seasons. Aesthetics begins with the body, but
it does not end there. H um an beings are indeed visual, tactile crea­
tures; we are also social, pattern-m aking, tool-using creatures. We
remember, innovate, experiment, teach, and improve. “M aking spe­
cial” is a complex discovery process— a search through trial and error,
experimentation and response, for sensory elements that move or
delight.
The prophets who forecast a sterile, uniform future were wrong,
because they imagined a society shaped by impersonal laws of history
and technology, divorced from individuality, pleasure, and im agina­
tion. But economics, technology, and culture are not purely im per­
sonal forces ruled by deterministic laws. They are dynamic, emergent
processes that begin in the personal— in individual action, individual
creativity, and individual desire. And, in our era, they are accelerating
aesthetic discovery.